Ireland- Did Vatican deceive UN panel? SNAP responds

Ireland- Did Vatican deceive UN panel? SNAP responds

For immediate release: Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com)

Irish minister Alan Shatter is seeking clarification from the Vatican for their misleading statements before a United Nations panel about the Magdalene laundries. We are disappointed, but not surprised by both the Vatican’s deception and the nuns' unchanged refusal to help victims.

We doubt there's any "miscommunication" here. Catholic officials often say whatever they want in order to get out of a jam or fix, and when caught being misleading, they claim there was some kind of mix up.

We hope the UN panel will denounce Vatican officials for being misleading. And we hope this negatively publicity will prompt the Vatican to be truthful and transparent.

(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 25 years and have more than 15,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org)

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I’m curious. Upon re-reading the headline to this post, as well as the first paragraph in Mr. Clohessy’s comment , this time paying particular attention to his statement about the nuns; “the nuns’ unchanged refusal to help victims.” For the first time since learning about the Magdalene laundries and the now, years and years later, attempt to establish the facts of child and disabled adult sexual and physical abuse suffered by the victims there, the thought just occurred to me that it MIGHT be possible that part of the reason the nuns have been recalcitrant, is that they might actually believe that at the time, they were “only doing what was ‘ordered’ of them, by their superiors”, and they do not want to be punished for having "followed orders, and thus having “been made into” (otherwise), “unwilling, enablers and conspiritors”. I don’t know. Do you think that scenario is possible? Or, were and are the nuns from the Magdalene laundries, all simply pedophile abusers, themselves? It seems so strange to me, that the nuns would not want the whole truth to come to light, unless they were guilty.